Identity management for the TUB Cloud

Abstract

Our students and researchers arrive nowadays at the university with a broad knowledge and expectations about the IT support and the IT technology. Notebooks, netbooks, smart phones together with a broad WiFi coverage enable a nearly unlimited freedom regarding information acquisition, selection, and processing regardless of the current working environment and the time of the day. A broad selection of available applications for smart phones removes even the necessity to be in a specific area in order to approach and use the services. Schools, colleges, and universities must adapt to the expectations of these digital natives and offer their services in a similar way. They must see the user as a customer in the middle of all processes and allow a maximum possible increase of efficiency in order to fulfill the complex requirements in study and research.
However, university such as TU Berlin is not comparable to a commercial provider of certain services, e.g. with a provider of flight tickets. The university unifies manifold services such as study, research, management, projects, patents, cooperation and many more. It also hosts different groups of users having different contexts and needs for services. The integrated service provision is to recognize the current user context, to identify the need, and to provide reliable access to the selected services regardless of the current working environment. In this paper, the path of the TU Berlin towards integrated service provision is described.